Health care community rallies after problems at St. Luke’s

Local hospitals pulled together to care for patients Wednesday after a severed oxygen line at one facility shut down operations there for several hours.

Courtney Potts and EMERSON CLARRIDGE

Local hospitals pulled together to care for patients Wednesday after a severed oxygen line at one facility shut down operations there for several hours.

Construction workers damaged a line supplying oxygen to the St. Luke’s Campus of Faxton St. Luke’s Healthcare at about 8:25 a.m. Wednesday and it took until 3 p.m. for crews to repair the damage, officials said.

In the meantime, St. Elizabeth Medical Center and Rome Memorial Hospital stepped in to handle additional patients as ambulances were diverted away from the New Hartford hospital.

“I am grateful that when a situation like this happens, we have such an excellent response by our employees and medical staff, as well as great support from our health care community,” Faxton St. Luke’s President and CEO Scott H. Perra said. “Adirondack Medical Gases, local home care service companies and the area hospitals all supported our needs and the needs of the patients while we made the repair. .... It was a real community effort.”

Anna Giannico, emergency department nurse manager at St. Elizabeth Medical Center, said her hospital called in extra staff for the day and saw a small uptick in patients as a result of the situation. She estimated about 70 patients came in while St. Luke’s was shut down.

“I guess you could classify it as a fairly busy day. But there have been busier,” she said.

Rome Memorial Hospital, which cannot accept trauma cases and typically serves a different geographic area than St. Elizabeth and St. Luke’s, also was prepared to take extra patients but “didn’t see an influx,” said Cassie Winter, assistant vice president of communications and marketing.

The oxygen line break at St. Luke’s occurred while a construction crew was installing barriers around an oxygen tank located outside and adjacent to the hospital, a hospital spokeswoman said.

There were 297 inpatients at the facility at the time, and 106 patients were on oxygen, hospital officials said. Those on oxygen included patients in the emergency department.

Patients who needed oxygen relied on portable tanks until the problem was solved, and the hospital obtained additional oxygen from Adirondack Medical Gases and other area companies.

All of the modifications and agreements were part of existing emergency preparedness plans between the three hospitals.

“It’s good to know that the health care providers in the community can work together to do what’s best for the patients,” Giannico said. “That’s what we did and if we had a problem we would expect that our fellow health care providers would do the same for us.”